Qt has a long history. The first stable version was released before the first version of C++ was standardized and long before the different C++ compiler vendors started shipping usable implementations of the C++ standard library. Because of this, Qt often followed (and still follows) some design idioms that feel unnatural to the usual C++ […]

A few weeks ago, we published an article with an overview of Visual Studio Code through the eyes of a Qt developer. In this short blog series, I will show you how to get up to speed with a Qt project using Visual Studio Code more in detail. Before digging into the Qt parts, I'd […]

The upcoming version of the C++ Standard (C++2a) is proposing to deprecate certain usages of the volatile keyword, by adopting the P1152 proposal (Deprecating volatile). Despite the somewhat "flamboyant" title, the actual deprecated parts are very limited and indeed the paper limits the deprecation to somehow language/library corner cases and/or dangerous antipatterns. For instance certain […]

Working on color imagery for QiTissue recently, I realized we were accidentally losing the alpha channel in multiple places. For efficiency reasons, we keep colors in memory using the QRgb type, and convert that to/from QString for serialization purposes via QColor as needed. Here's what I discovered about why that doesn't work, and some ways […]

Did you miss the past Qt World Summit? Were you there, but you couldn't attend that talk or two that you really wanted to see because the conference was so, so packed with awesome content? Fear no more! We are glad to announce that the talks at the past Qt World Summit 2019 in Berlin […]

A few days ago Marc Mutz, colleague of mine at KDAB and also author in this blog, spotted this function from Qt's source code (documentation): Apart from the mistake of considering empty strings not uppercase, which can be easily fixed, the loop in the body looks innocent enough. How would we figure out if a […]

Have you ever noticed code highlighting disappearing in Qt Creator for some projects, without any apparent reason? Can't get Ctrl+Click to work on any class name or function name anymore? Maybe you have ignored it at first, got used to it, and decided it's just one of those things that just "happen sometimes"; or maybe […]

Continuing our blog series about KDToolBox, this time we will discuss UiWatchDog, a keepalive monitor for the GUI thread. Alive? A fundamental rule when writing applications in event-driven UI frameworks such as Qt is: do not ever block the GUI thread! The GUI thread is also usually called the main thread of the application -- […]

Software developers like tools, and in particular tools that make them more productive. So in this blog post, I am going to share with you some of the experiences some of us here at KDAB have had using Visual Studio Code for Qt development. Motivation of using Visual Studio Code instead of Qt Creator The […]

C++ Russia is the premier C++ conference in East Europe which alternates between Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The conference lasts for two days starting October 31st. It will be held in the Park Inn by Radisson Pulkovskaya Hotel in the heart of Saint Petersburg. This year, the speaker line-up is quite impressive and includes names […]

With this blog post we are going to kickstart our brand new blog series about KDToolBox. The first class we're exploring is KDTableToListProxyModel, a table-to-list proxy model. The main use case for KDTableToListProxyModel is exposing tabular models to Qt Quick. Qt Quick has a certain number of "view" elements that only support list models: for […]

At KDAB we invest a significant amount of efforts in research and development. We are always looking for new tooling, libraries and utilities that can make our job easier and improve the C++ and Qt ecosystems. Ultimately, the gained knowledge and skills make our customers happier. As part of this process we develop lots of […]

In the previous two blogs in this series I showed how solving an apparently simple problem about loading a lot of data into RAM using mmap() also turned out to require a solution that improved CPU use across cores. In this blog, I’ll show how we dealt with the bottleneck problems that ensued, and finally, […]

In the first blog in this series, I showed how we solved the original problem of how to use mmap() to load a large set of data into RAM all at once, in response to a request for help from a bioinformatics group dealing with massive data sets on a regular basis. The catch in […]

A few months ago, we received a phone call from a bioinformatics group at a European university. The problem they were having appeared very simple. They wanted to know how to usemmap() to be able to load a large data set into RAM at once. OK I thought, no problem, I can handle that one. […]

KDAB has released a new version of KDSoap. This is version 1.8.0 and comes more than one year since the last release (1.7.0). KDSoap is a tool for creating client applications for web services without the need for any further component such as a dedicated web server. KDSoap lets you interact with applications which have […]

This is a follow-up post to Qt on CMake Workshop Summary – Feb ’19 Intro From May 2nd to May 3rd another Qt on CMake workshop was hosted at the KDAB premises in Berlin, where interested stakeholders from both The Qt Company and KDAB gathered together to drive the CMake build system in Qt further. […]

Sometimes it seems that we have nearly infinite memory resources, especially compared to the tiny 48K RAM of yesteryear’s 8-bit computers. But today’s complex applications can soak up megabytes before you know it. While it would be great if developers planned their memory management for all applications, thinking through a memory management strategy is crucial […]